Family Snapshots

Two films about families at war, with themselves, with each-other, and with the world at large. "Wasp" is a short by Andrea Arnold (maker of the brilliant "Red Road"), that plunges the viewer straight into the torrent of anger, pride and depthless devotion between a mother and her 4 daughters living on an unnamed estate somewhere in Essex. It's impossible not to hope that the children manage to keep themselves amused and safe outside a brutal bungalow-pub while their mother ekes out the couple of pounds she has trying to turn an old flame home from the army into boyfriend material, while trying to explain the children's presence away to him. Desperate and compelling stuff; I'm not sure if I cold have stood up to more than 25 minutes of that sort of tension, so the short format was just as well.

"The Brotherhood" (Tae Guk Gi) is a vast flashback of a war film, which derives all its power from the short sequences at the outset, framing the gunfights and civilian deaths in a search for the body of a lost 'other', a brother captured by the North Korean army and apparently turned into the leader of a terrifying elite unit. It's impossible not to see the enactment of a hoped-for reunification of North and South in the recovery of the older brother's body and the uncovering of the post-war life he had hoped for had he survived the war. The tools for progress in the future are firmly buried in the most violent moments from the past.